The path to Skewers begins with Gongti mega-clubs. Clubbing leads to drinking. Drinking leads to dancing. Dancing leads to hunger. And hunger, if you wind up at Skewers, leads to suffering. It may not have quite the laundry list of repercussions that some paths of ill repute have, like, say, the path to the Dark Side, but the upscale chuan’r restaurant down the road from Beijing’s domino row of nightlife emporiums certainly doesn’t buck the trend set by its neighbours.

But that’s the point. Skewers thrives off a local dependency. Hordes of drunken partygoers stumble out with teeth primed to gnash, in search of the nearest street stand serving barbecued meat. Skewers indulges this base desire, and certainly is trying to making a fat profit in the process. Why charge pocket change for lamb chunks on a stick when you could hide the grimy grill away in the kitchen of some tacky party-central real estate and charge seven times as much? It’s a painfully obvious business strategy. And that’s precisely what Skewers has done.

We first arrive at Skewers to find the place closed. It’s 1pm and, having not eaten breakfast, a chuan’r feast sounds like a reasonable way to satisfy our furious stomachs. But Skewers isn’t after the lunch crowd. The late opening hours correlate precisely with the time range of pre-party, mid-party and post-party gorges.

Skewers isn’t good sober food, you’d have to be on the verge of blacking out to even enjoy it drunk, and the prices will empty your wallet faster than a mugger, especially after a night of blisteringly expensive Tsingtaos at Babyface. Plastered or not, we wouldn’t touch Skewers with a ten-foot kebab pole.

Source: timeoutbeijing.com